Why I Am a Salafi. Michael Muhammad Knight
Читать онлайн книгу.of globalized “traditional” Sunn
There are tensions in my Islam that have haunted me through much of the two decades that I have been making and remaking myself as a Muslim; I want to call them Salaf
With bismill
THE TRUTH STANDS clear from error, the Qur’
The term fundamentalist as popularly used in conversations about religion was inspired by Christian pamphlets. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles disseminated its pamphlet series, The Fundamentals, with the intention to “provide intellectually sound, popularly accessible defense of the Christian faith.”4 In this context, to be a fundamentalist wasn’t a bad thing: It meant that one upheld Christianity’s “fundamentals” in the face of Darwinism, modern literary theories and biblical criticism, and liberalized churches that denied the Bible’s literal inerrancy. The Fundamentals sought to prove in pamphlets’ limited space that the Bible represented historically and scientifically unassailable fact, that it was only through loyalty to the Bible’s literal truth that one could ground an unchanging Christianity against the unstable modern world.
Safi argues that we can and must do better than “pamphlet Islam,” and I agree, but I’m also afraid that our efforts might only produce bigger pamphlets. Progressive Muslim reformism, with all its performance of theoretical sophistication, sometimes makes for its own counterpamphlet that’s no less simplistic. Anyway, a certain brand of pamphlet Islam is where I come from. Once I entered into a Muslim community, pamphlets became maps to show me the straight path. I also left Islam through the pamphlets; in the period that I considered myself an ex-Muslim, it was because the pamphlets’ easy answers and imaginary hegemonies couldn’t hold up to the complexities of being a Muslim in my real life. The pamphlets are meant to be read once and passed along; their arguments disintegrate if you spend too much time with them.
But there had to be a time when it was really that simple, right? Wouldn’t a “pamphlet Islam” be closer to the original Islam, the Islam of our Prophet? The stuff that can’t fit into a pamphlet amounts to later elaboration and refinement, which, if I’m trying to recover my Salafism, is unnecessary. Safi critiques the popular catchphrase that Islam’s truth lies in its simplicity, but if I imagine what Islam would look like in the presence of the Prophet, an Islam in which people did not theorize on questions of authority and interpretation, it had to be simple. Perhaps in Mu
At a Muslim Students’ Association “Islam 101” event intended to teach non-Muslim students about Islam, I sat and listened to a woman